peristaltor

Over the last few years, I've had a sneaking suspicion that somethings have happened in key years that changed the course of history. The first (and, perhaps, the second) involve the Baby Boom.

First, here's the boom in a graph (from this site):



( Oh, he's ranting about the Boomers again. Will it never end?!? )


*It seems the NPR archive is not easily found. I refuse to enrich private podcast caches with a link. You'll have to search it, but it is easily found. Seriously, NPR, what can't you fuck up?

Quite by accident, I managed to hear two TED talks back to back that present two very different visions about what the future holds in store for us now. ( First, the good news. )

( Then again, there's the not as good news. )

*Martenson's Crash Course is essential viewing. Essential. No kidding. Sit down as soon as possible and take it in.

X-Posted to talk_politics.

For those of you still unfamiliar with M. King Hubbert and his now-famous theory of "peak oil," do look up Wiki entries on his name and theory. If you don't, not only will this entry seem curious (if not completely unhinged), but so will reality.

If you're still curious about what this might mean for, well, everyone on earth, ( join me as I point out landmarks on the road to simplicity. )


X-posted to talk_politics.

Over the years on the intertubes, I've noticed when people get especially passionate about a topic they tend to forget that the common way to make words legible online is to include double page-breaks instead of the traditional single page-break and indented paragraphs. Online, I don't know why, reading an especially long paragraph makes it look like a page from ancient Greek text.

Which is, kinda, exactly the opposite of what the poster intends the reply to be, isn't it? Isn't the object of a long rant to convince the reader of their error?

So, wouldn't going on and on in a monolithic block of ranty text be a sign that the intention of the post has divorced itself from the post itself long ago, taken the children and pinned a note on the lawn?

Based on that, allow me to propose Perry's Index of Emotional Trainwreckery as Measured by Typesetting. It's a one-to-ten scale of readability based only on a lack of page breaks and other pagination. The longer the block, the closer to 10 (and a visit from the kind people in white coats) the commenter might just be.

What ya think?

The audio is a speech he recently gave; the video his Powerpoint presentation accompanying the speech.

Wonk Alert: He rushes through the thing (probably do to time constraints), and presents info only economists would love. If you haven't read his blog or book, Debunking Economics——and even if you have, but aren't an econ prof——it might go over your head, like most of it did mine.

Oh, and in the presentation he mentions a back-and-forth pissing match between him and Paul Krugman. Do go to the blog and check out the entries on this match. It summerizes the key differences between economists the government and press turn to for econ advice, and the economists (like Keen) who actually predicted the economic crisis we're now in.

( Addendum: Interview with Keen on this Krugman blog fight. )

Oh, and LJ? Please stop converting the embed codes to shit that simply don't work. K? THNX.

X-Posted to talk_politics.

(I've been putting this one off for too long. I can't drop it, try as I may to convince myself. It's just not droppable.)

Ah, Mike Daisy. First you bend the facts of the case, then you defend the bending.

For those of you as late to this kerfuffle as I am, Mr. Daisy — a most entertaining chap, from what I've heard of his work on the radio — bagged the elephant, as it could be put in theater circles, convincing This American Life to run a short version of his stage play on their show. It led to the most downloaded episode in the show's already heady history, grabbing over 880,000 downloads.

Then, just a few weeks later, came the retraction. It turns out Mr. Daisy "embellished" his China visit account portrayed in his one-man show. Little details were "exaggerated" for the listening audiences to more fittingly adapt his trip to the "theatrical experience."

And after all that, instead of hanging his head in shame, he unleashes on TAL in a blog post.

In the last forty-eight hours I have been equated with Stephen Glass, James Frey, and Greg Mortenson.

You forgot Milli Vanilli. More to the point, you forgot Andrew Breitbart.

Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers.

Yes, Mike, that's the case. You just don't get it, do you? You see, there is a very real difference between fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction is verifiable fact; fiction is what people pull out of their ass. A key point here: it doesn't matter how much is fact and how much is ass-pulled. Like racist policies in the deep South, transforming a work of fact into something pulled from an ass requires only one drop of fiction.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of ass product. More than half the books I read are bowel fabrications of the highest quality, ones I enjoy greatly. Most of the movies, the same. Of the shit Orson Welles pulled out of his own copious ass, for example, I cannot get enough. (Well, except for a few. Not all his ass-pulls were great; some were shitty pieces. We all have them, and they should be flushed.)

Magician Jamie Ian Swiss has a phrase for pulling things out of your ass for entertainment: he considers them "honest lies", in that everyone watching or reading or listening (yes, most music lyrics are lies as well) accepts that the following is not necessarily true, but is instead meant to entertain.

Meaning when you get up on stage or in front of a microphone and portray some events that actually happened and intersperse events and observations that did not happen — in other words to forgo any adequate disclaimer about what the audience can expect — you are not lying honestly. You are inviting the audience to follow an account they will consider factual.

Meaning it better be factual. Because, if you don't, everything you say will be called into question, and not just in Agony.

Everything.

Here's an example. A few years before this particular piece, Mr. Daisy produced something called Monopoly!, a "devastating monologue about monopoly and its discontents," where Mr. Daisey "explores the warped genius of inventor Nikola Tesla and his war with Thomas Edison over electricity." Portions of this aired on another public radio show, Studio 360's "Nikola Tesla: Strange Genius." With me so far?

Excerpted from Daisy's show was a passage about Edison's DC trolleys. According to the piece, these streetcars would occasionally start buzzing strangely; when this happened, all the locals knew from past experience some kind of violent electrical discharge would soon follow. If they didn't get away from the streetcar, a bolt might find a bystander and electrocute him or her. Daisy proclaims that this was the origin of the Brooklyn Dodgers' name, and invites skeptical listeners to "google it!"

Shortly after TAL's "Retraction" aired, I did. At the Wiki (as I write today), we learn that by "1890, New Yorkers (Brooklyn was a separate city until it became a borough in 1898) routinely called anyone from Brooklyn a 'trolley dodger', due to the vast network of street car lines criss-crossing the borough as people dodged trains to cross the streets."

I didn't think it necessary to do so at the time, but when I google'd the name origin a few weeks ago, there was a big red warning label on the entry questioning the veracity of some of the information provided, and (without letting the reader know what this was) noted that the questioned information had since been retracted. I'm willing to bet that information might have had some connection to Mr. Daisy's trolley bolts of death. After TAL, someone thought to retrace all of his utterances, and to remove a bit of information that he himself probably lifted from the net without properly verifying it. In other words, thanks to the fact that Mr. Daisy said it, someone else thought it necessary to either prove or disprove, and now it's gone from the web. Scrubbed.

Thinking back, I realize I had heard Daisy on the radio many years ago. He did an interview here in Seattle just after his stint as a phone support guy at Amazon.com in promotion of another theater piece, "21 Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com." I laughed at his observations regarding that job, at the silliness of some of Amazon's policies, some of which I've heard first hand from friends. Now, I'm not so sure those stories, like the one he told about improving his caller response time (or whatever Amazon called it), were stunts he pulled himself, or stories he pulled out of his ass.

It's sad when people who used to be believed are suspected of uttering untruths. Think Dan Rather. Think most any oh-so-totally-not-gay Republican "family values" lawmaker. Take as wide a stance on your performance piece as you think likely, Mr. Daisy, but you have failed. Worse, it's obvious to me at least that you care deeply about the conditions Chinese workers face as they labor to build our stuff. Consider this: though nobody seriously questioned the silliness surrounding GWB's ROTC service, the fact that the document hinting at such silliness was a forgery (printed, I'm sure, by Karl Rove himself) derailed not just Dan Rather's career, but also any other reporter's pursuit to document W's shady past. CBS handed President George W. Bush authenticity and respectability he most assuredly did not deserve.

Back to Mike:

Especially galling is how many are gleefully eager to dance on my grave expressly so they can return to ignoring everything about the circumstances under which their devices are made. Given the tone, you would think I had fabulated an elaborate hoax, filled with astonishing horrors that no one had ever seen before.

One lie begets another, Mr. Daisy. One lie begets another. It may gall, but you did the galling. You galled your audience. According to them, you lied once, so. . . . So if you hear about another Chinese tech factory explosion or mangled hand or chemical spill in the very near future and would like someone to blame, Mr. Daisy, perhaps you should find a mirror.

After going over the basics of money yesterday and today (with a clarifying trip along the way), I'm finally going to print that Peribuck and see how I can spend it.


Money should smile!

( Ah, but how to spend it? )

X-Posted to talk_politics.

I need to open this long, long post with a correction, one I should have issued some time ago. I wrote the last posts, Taking Stick of Money Yesterday and Today, without correcting immediately a misconception about the nature of what money is. By not jumping on that with jack-booted gusto, I failed to correct what I'm sensing must be one of the most outrageous lies in economic thought, a lie that leads to all sorts of following lies that in accumulation clutter the average head with complete nonsense.

( And the correction is. . . . )

X-Posted to talk_politics.

When last I posted, I ended our short history of money noting, among other things, that money is no longer backed by precious metals as once it "was" (I hope to make the scare quotes more salient later). Even before Pres. Nixon removed the US from the gold standard in 1971, wild swings in our money supply drove the country into a Great Depression that few theorists foresaw. Few theorists today foresaw the current crisis, and that should be easily explained. We have, essentially, unlearned the lessons of the Great Depression, removing the legal speed governors and safety interlocks that prevented our economy from revving too out of control from 1934 to about 1980, pulling the final bit of monetary prudence away from the system in 1999.

For that reason, it is illustrative to go back to the heady days of 1929 and see the policies that brought down the economy . . . you know, the policies we have today . . . and maybe answer brucenstein's initial question about the weirdness of money. ( I'll try my best. )

The other day, brucenstein asked in a somewhat snarky way if a Peristaltordollar (!) "creates wealth." After having a hearty chuckle at issuing my own currency, I realized yes, it could. It all depended upon what role my PeriBuck plays in my society.

And to determine that, we first thing we need to know is that ( one kind of money is not the same as another. )

X-posted to talk_politics.